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In this episode, I talk with Michael Schrage about designing customers and running experiments in the world of book publishing.

Michael Schrage is a visiting fellow at MIT and the author of several books including Who do you want your customers to become? and The Innovator’s Hypothesis.

In the first half of the interview, we talk about an better way to think about customers and why cheap experiments are than good ideas. In the latter half, we apply these ideas to readers, authors and the world of book publishing.

A few months ago, I noticed the songs I listen to give a view into how I am seeing the world. For a long time, I loved a good song about self-doubt. Lately the mix has been around positivity and growth. It’s interesting seeing myself drawn unconsciously to music ahead of the work I need to do in my life.

That insight about my listening habits lead me to look around at other parts of my life and what clues might be hiding in plain sight.

With my reading lately, I didn’t notice how much I was reading female authors. There was no plan for this curation, but it is again interesting to see.

Among recent reads are:

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin – A recent NYT article pointed me to the book and its update this year. The book does a fine job of talking about managing your money and managing the emotions that arise. Both matter.

Powerful by Patty McCord – As the former Head of People at Netflix, Patty had a front row seat for the growth and amazing change at the entertainment giant. I believe this is the first book from an executive at Netflix and you get a view into the company.

Advice for Future Corpses by Sallie Tisdale – You may not want to read a book about death, but you should. Sallie is a great writer.

Business of Being A Writer by Jane Friedman – So much has changed about being a writer and how to pursue it as a profession. Jane’s book is dense with wonderful advice.

Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski – This is the best book I have ever read about sex. It’s not scintillating or racy. It covers the biology, the physiology, and the psychology in a positive, clear way.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat – A wonderfully different approach to cooking and the book is beautiful.

Pencil Me In by Christina Wodtke – I have never met a sketch note / visual thinking book I didn’t like. This book is a wonderful compilation of original and complied material from other experts.

One of the interesting problems is how you handle an author with multiple books.

There are advantages to readers being able to recognize titles from a given authority, but that can also introduce a symmetry which makes the books seems like copies of one another.

I noticed recently that Tor chose to rebrand all the books by Cory Doctorow. I honestly can’t decide if I like the decision or not. I remember the books by their original covers and I like these too.

Here is the catalog of books from Pat Lencioni.

The covers are smaller here but you can see how across the room you can identify his books.

My designer Joy pointed me to Marilynne Robinson’s books and how they have pulled them together. The balance of difference and sameness feels best to me in this series. The typography creates consistency but its placement and the images makes them feel like different books.

So, this is just three examples. Cover consistency is an interesting question because there is no magic answer, but it is interesting to see how different publishers approach it.

You can’t look at a book to see you it fits into your life. And that matters more as we measure our lives in smaller and smaller slices of time.

I found this image on Alexis Ohanian’s book Without Their Permission:

I liked that the image marks how much time it would take to read and when it might fit into the reader’s life. Youtube videos, Audible audiobook tracks, and Netflix movies each tell us total time for that piece of content.

With digital content, we also know how far we are with the elapsed time marker. As we approach a point in time when we need to move to something else, we can easily decide if we should pause or continue.

Books are bad at both of these concepts because books vary so much. It is easy for publishers to shrink or expand the number of words on a page through line spacing or font size. The size of the page can vary too with big implications across hundreds of pages. The language the author uses can affect the speed of reading. Let’s not even talk about how pictures and photos have no real standardization. The bottom line is the physical appearance of a book is not a good way to judge how long it will take to read.

Medium estimates the time it will take to read their articles. This function also available as a plug-in for blogs and others forms of online publishing. Maybe our devices should tell us how much time is left in a chapter based on the data it has collected, based on our reading rate and the reading rate of others for our current book, other books in the genre and all books collectively. This would be a welcome replacement to our old method of paging ahead to find the chapter’s end.

I have been wondering if we should display the time length of the audiobook alongside the page count of print books or maybe even next to the price of the title. This information is more easily gotten as audiobooks are becoming more common. This could be another useful marker for a reader to determine if they want to buy that particular book.

Smart book publishers might even help readers get over the attention anxiety by providing time estimates for each chapter:

“You can read this book in ten easy installments of 17 minutes each!”

Books definitely fit into our lives. Let’s just do a better job of showing customers how.

I had lunch yesterday with a writer in Portland who works with authors.

Davia is great. She thinks big. She tries to draw out the best from the author and what will most help the readers. It was easy to talk shop for two and a half hours over chicken kebabs. The conversation centered around three projects and each existed across the range of feasibility.

The first project was ill defined. There was no one sentence description. Neither of us could get a sense of what would fix the problem. We spent the most time talking about this one and made the least progress.

The second project was promising but it also existed in this fuzzy realm. This author could write any of several books but none of ideas reflected who they were. We later exchanged emails on a concept they all had in common. It felt like the right book, but it was the one that was going to take craft and care to write.

The third was already done. The topic was timely. Demand would only grow over time. The author had credibility. The only question was how fast could it be written.

Books are a strange amalgam of author, idea and zeitgeist. Three months from now all of these books could be in different places, better or worse. It makes the work infinitely interesting and equally frustrating at times.

On the front page of the Sunday New York Times this week is an article titled “In E-book Era, Rule for Writers Is Type Faster!” The piece focuses on the additional work already busy authors are doing now as readers demand more new material. Some are writing more books. Some are writing novellas between books. Some are hiring writers so they can write more books.

There are some interesting thoughts between the lines:

Publishers want to be able to capitalize on faddish interest in an author with more stuff readers can buy. Does art go well with speed? Is there other ways to gain permission to talk to readers in between books?

Talent is scarce and once commercial success is seen publishers want to scale the art. What are the limits to that kind of effort?

Abundance of an author’s works correlates to more sales and through these additional avenues discoverability improves. Does lower prices have the same abundance effect? How about removing DRM?

Do yourself a favor and start building a tribe today. I promise there are a handful of people who right now want to know what you are working on. I also know that they will tell others if you share with the tribe the things they need to hear.

This question of copying an idea that already exists comes up a lot in book publishing as we make choices about what to write and what to publish. A blog post over at Whittle Idea suggests a another question to consider when faced with these situations:

Drew Houston, founder of Drop-box, pitched the idea of file sharing across computers to a bunch of investors. The leading objection was “there are many file sharing services out there”.

Drew Houston turned to an investor who dismissed the idea & asked “Do you use any file sharing service?”. The answer was “No”. In the following discussion, he established that prospective users were not yet taken.

That is how you find if the idea is already taken – by checking if the prospective users are already taken.

If prospective users are still available, the idea is still available. If the need is real, all you need is to reach and resonate with those users, in a way [others] could not.

If someone would have asked me if I bought any of the other books on the market, I would have said no. There were more readers out there. In our case, we have outsold any other book in our segment by a ratio of 3:1.

There is a risk of misusing this question if you only ask yourself but if you are talking to potential customers it is a great qualifier to see if a market is still in play.

In this second part of a two episode interview, I talk with Eric Ries, serial entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

The focus of the second part of this interview is Eric’s views of book publishing and what changes he would recommend in applying the lean startup methodologies to the industry. This segment will be of particular interest to publishers looking to apply agile methodologies to their businesses.

In 1959, a wealthy English industrialist named Henry Kremer established a £350,000 prize for the first person that could develop a human powered airplane that could fly a figure eight course around two markers spaced a half a mile apart. Several attempts had been made in the early part of the century but no one could develop an airplane that could travel any significant distance. Over the eight years, several more groups would make attempts without success.

At this point, the Kremer Prize was only open to the British, but in 1967 Kremer raised the prize to £500,000 and opened the competition to all nationalities. Ten more years passed before someone would pass Kremer’s challenge and complete the course with a plane powered by a human.

You probably know the winner more by his creations than his name. On August 23, 1977, The Gossamer Condor was the first human powered aircraft to complete the course. The larger Gossamer Albatross followed two years later with a successful flight across the English Channel and won a second Kremer Prize. This inventor’s work later shifted to solar powered aircraft with the creation of the Gossamer Penguin, the Solar Challenger, and NASA’s Helios Prototype.

Behind these marvels is a man named Paul MacCready and given it took over twenty years for someone to create the machine to accomplish the Kremer’s original challenge, it would seem proper to ask what was remarkable about MacCready.

First, MacCready was motivated. In this case, he needed the money. He was the guarantor on a loan on a family member’s failed business and was in need of $100,000 to repay the bank, but what was truly unique about MacCready was his approach to the work.

The teams who had attempted to create human powered aircraft all used the same approach. They would plan, conject, and theorize for a year and then build a machine that contained all of their assumptions. During shortly into the first test flight, those assumptions would come crashing down to the ground and the process would repeat.

As Aza Raskin and Alan Kay tell the story, MacCready’s radical approach was to build a prototype that could be quickly modified and rebuilt. His plane could be fixed in hours and the new assumptions could tested again the same day. With this approach, MacCready solved the twenty year old challenge and the age old dilemma of human powered flight in six months.

So, what happens when we can build things that can easily rebuild?

In my essay The Paperless Book, I lament the paradigm that governs our view of the book, the way it paralyzes the ability for the concept of a book to evolve.

Books aren’t built to be rebuilt. Authors labor in their sheds and their untested assumptions cause so many books to come crashing down from the sky. There is a better way.

I just finished a new chapter for Every Book Is a Startup called Minimum Viable Publishing. It will be added to the project in a few weeks and it will be my first attempt to get at the benefits of being able to test your assumptions and rebuild books as you create them.

Last week, Baldur Bjarnason at the FutureBook blog shared his impressions of their 2011 conference. He write about the directions that various publishing companies are moving in the market.

The future might look something like this: A product innovation and commercialisation company develops a property into various products. They partner with a infrastructure management company like Ingram to provide the backbone that keeps everything together and moves everything from the right spot to the next right spot. Sometimes they partner with another former publishing company, that now emphasises publishing services instead of products, to fill in the gaps in their own capabilities. And they partner with a customer relationship company like Amazon and Kobo (for ebooks), or Apple and Google (for apps), for the ever so important end point of selling something to a consumer. The issue of one customer relationship company effectively owning all customers in a single sector is mitigated by the fact that the product company isn’t tied to doing a single kind of product.

Bjarnason properly credits John Hagel and John Seely Brown for the strategic construct. The long version can be found in their book The Only Sustainable Advantage. The shorter version can be found in a 1999 HBR article that Hagel wrote with Marc Singer titled Unbundling The Corporation. In the latter source, Hagel and Singer actually lament Amazon’s strategic choice to be both a customer relationship company and an infrastructure company. It would be interesting to hear their rebuttal to Amazon’s recent and growing movement in the third space of product innovation as a book publisher.

The question I have pondered in this three part structure is if product innovation and customer relationship are better paired together. Look at the incredible success of Apple’s move into retail and the role that has played in their growth. The Lean Startup methodology suggests that you can’t make what the customer wants unless you are close to the customer.

Or look at Louis CK’s choice this week to offer a new show directly to his fans for five dollars (and smartly asks during the checkout if you would like subscribe to get email updates). It’s Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans riff is about finding people “who will purchase anything and everything you produce.” In so many cases, you want to create great art and own the customer relationship.

P.S. Chris Dixon wrote last week about how the separation of design and manufacturing creates an environment for “garage ready” startups. So, the separation of innovation and infrastructure makes space for new companies to grow. It also creates the need for someone to build the interface and the tools so these two disciplines can talk to each other.

Here is a quick rundown my best writing from 2011 that has appeared across several sites.

The major theme is that book publishing is amidst a major transition. Bookstores don’t know how to compete. The media is overly prone to hyperbole. And your customers don’t know what a book is anymore.

The challenges I wrote about this year are still with us and I predict 2012 will be another year of similar upheaval, the final year of a five-year disruption that started in 2007 with Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle, peaked with the 2009 Macmillan/Amazon shootout, and in its wake has created Amanda Hocking and bankrupt Borders.

Creating Confusion (toddsattersten.com, 5/31/11) – More example of how we don’t know how to talk about publishing

The Future of Bookselling (Shelf Awareness, June 2, 2011) – Physical bookstores can’t compete on convenience with Amazon, but there is another choice.

What Startups Can Teach Publishers (Publishing Perspectives, 9/20/11) – The relationships between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists vs. authors and publishers are more similar than you might think.

The Paperless Book (O’Reilly Radar, 11/30/11) – The problem for publishers is that customers don’t know what a book is anymore.

At the very moment the poor old book-object dissolves before our eyes, pecked to pieces by the angry birds of Kindle, iPad and the rest, we are renewing our primary contract with the author by offering him our ears.

Parker’s essay, along with John Schwartz’s accompanying piece, make the case for the underappreciation of the audiobook (something the audiobook ads surrounding the articles want you to appreciate as well).

Part of Parker’s case for rise of audiobooks comes from Peter Osnos’s piece on theatlantic.com. The founder of book publisher Public Affairs claims a coming renaissance in audio. Osnos is accurate in his statistics when he says audiobooks sell “somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the book’s total sales.” His forecast for digital is bullish, claiming bits are going to be a real game changer for the audiobooks as people subscribe using Audible and download on iTunes.

I don’t see or believe audiobooks will actively gain market share from print books, but two things struck me reading these two devotionals to the category:

The original form of the art is usually the best. This American Life and RadioLab are conceived to be listened to; reading the manuscript is not the same. Movies derived from books always lack the depth of the prose. I wonder if an audiobook original would be more successful? Has there been any audiobook originals?